I don’t know about you, but when something happens health wise either with me or the dogs, I usually have a bunch of questions. Once I get those answered I like to mull over the issue (similar to the way most people sip wine), then I form my thoughts of how I think I’d like to proceed. Once that’s done, I feel out a couple of other people.
As most of you know Sampson went in for routine tooth removal on the 19th of January and they discovered an irregular heart beat as well as a heart murmur. Since he was already at the vet he had a chest x-ray and the heart looked normal, so the next thing they suggested was an Ultrasound of his heart, which was also normal.
Another visit to the vet? I love them and all, but this is getting ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as a dog wearing boots.
The Dr. performing the Ultrasound said the next cause of these types of irregular heart beats is tumors on the liver or spleen. My vet called and asked if they could Ultrasound those as well and I said of course. (In for a penny, in for a pound, right?) There were no tumors/masses on the liver or spleen, which was good news. BUT they did find a very tiny nodule on one of one of his Adrenal glands. When discussing this with another vet, I said, I’m just relieved she didn’t say mass and the vet said, yes it is a mass. Way to lure me into feeling okay about this.
My vet thought it possible that Sampson might have Cushing’s disease and asked if she could run a blood test, which came back normal. She then suggested a urine test to check for dilution. I was pretty adamant that he didn’t have Cushing’s having already consulted Dr. Google, but I used my Ninja pee skills and dropped off a sample.
I was shocked when the vet called and said his urine was diluted. The next thing she said, was we should put him through the test for Cushing’s Disease. And that’s where I drew the line. My thought process was this, he has no symptoms of Cushing’s, so why would I make him spend another full, stressful day at the vet’s office?
I put in a call to one of the owner’s of the practice who tends to lean towards the Holistic approach and asked him to call me to discuss it.
He opened the conversation with, “Welcome to Pandora’s box”. Which in layman’s terms means, we’ve ruled out a good portion of what Sampson DOESN’T have, but we still don’t know WHAT, if anything, he does have.
So we talked about the Cushing’s test and he had an alternative suggestion. There is a urine test (fairly new, currently only run at a laboratory in Wisconsin) which tests the levels of cortisol and creatine and it can rule out Cushing’s.
The way it was explained to me is thus, the test can do one of two things, it can tell you the dog DOESN’T have Cushing’s Disease, but it cannot tell you if the dog has it. Savvy?
The urine test was about $102 vs approximately $300 for all-day-at-the-vet to test for Cushing’s Disease. For me it was a no brainer. Put my dog through a stressful test, or utilize my pee ninja skills again? *Note here, it was not about the money, because I would spend the $300 IF I thought he had Cushing’s, but my Spidey senses were saying NO.*
So Thursday night I picked up the dog’s water bowl around 8:00 in the hopes of making sure Sampson’s urine was good and concentrated. His first pee of the day was at 8:45 Friday morning and it looked nice and dark to me, but I dropped it off anyway.
The vet called on Tuesday and said “As you suspected, he does not have Cushing’s.” Well…she said there’s always a small chance, like the odds of him getting struck by lightening or winning the lottery. Which would be really rare, since he’s never played the lottery as long as I’ve known him.
I feel fairly confident in saying, we’ve ruled out Cushing’s Disease, but we need to monitor that little adrenal. The vet was comfortable waiting a couple of months, but not me. I’d rather err on the side of caution (and Hubby agrees with me) so we plan on having it rechecked either the 17th or 24th of this month, depending on what the Ultrasound Dr. says.
The vet and I talked about what could be going on with that adrenal and it could be a benign little nothing that could have been there for a while, or it could be something really sinister. She spelled it for me and then the next words out of her mouth were, “I really regret spelling that for you just now, because I know you’re going to go on the internet.”
They know me SO well.
She then asked me to please not go searching around on the internet and I told her I wouldn’t. And I’m not.
In the meantime, he still has a partial ACL tear on his other leg and they can’t do surgery on him because they don’t know why he has the irregular heart beat. I’m not sure I WANT to do surgery on him to begin with, because he was one of those dogs that just never recovered well from it. Whether that was just the way Sampson is built or the surgery itself, we don’t know. The Vet says it doesn’t hurt to do a consultation with a surgeon just to see what they say as they have methods of working on high risk dogs that the typical vet doesn’t, but right now, he’s just so wiped out, I don’t have the heart to put him through it.
You can see the spot just above his knee where they shaved him for the Ultrasound.
So for now, we are limiting him to two, five to seven minute very slow walks just to get him outside the yard to potty.
If the next Ultrasound shows no change with the adrenal, we’ll more than likely make an appointment to see a surgeon, if there are changes in the adrenal…well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Right now, I just feel really helpless and heartbroken for poor Sampson.
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